5 Ways To Increase AdSense Revenue For Your Website In 2020

Publishers were met with a lot of changes in 2019. There were endless Google Core Algorithm updates and preparation for new privacy regulations like the CCPA. On top of that, publishers had to create new content, grow quality traffic, and attempt to increase revenues. Despite these challenges, many publishers want to know how to increase AdSense revenue in 2020.

Ad rates as a whole were lower in 2019 than in 2018. The Ad Revenue Index shows that the peak of ad rates—Black Friday—did not hit the same peak as it did in 2018.

The data from the performance report showed that the 10 websites with the highest revenue growth wrote an average of 87 blogs. In contrast, the 10 websites that had the least amount of revenue growth wrote an average of 25 pieces of content in 2019.

Source: 2020 Publisher Performance Report

Additionally, our top digital content trends survey found that 71.9% of publishers said writing long-form content was the most successful tactic for their website growth in 2019. Many publishers can relate to this tactic being their top priority. But is long-form content the best way to increase AdSense revenue?

We did see that the two second-highest-earning word count ranges were 1000-2500 words and 2500-5000 words. These word counts are more in line with what most have traditionally said are the optimal content lengths for SEO.

What’s more important is to notice that both the highest and lowest ends of the word count ranges cause earnings to suffer the most. Articles with fewer than 250 words and articles with over 5000 words had the lowest EPMVs.

Publishers using Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics have the benefit of seeing revenue by word count to understand what length earns the most money for their specific audience. They can also see how content length affects engagement metrics like bounce rate and page engaged time.

2. Create more video content

As of January 2020, YouTube is the second-most popular social network on the web. There are over 2 billion users, and over 1 billion hours of video content is consumed on the platform every day.

So why should digital publishers care? Because for certain queries being searched on Google, the SERP will have a handful of video results that appear close to the top. Here is an example using the topic keyword of this article: “How to increase AdSense revenue in 2020.”

These results can drive traffic to your YouTube channel, but it can also do the same for your website if you natively host your videos. Legally speaking, it would violate antitrust laws if Google gave preference to only YouTube videos in these SERPs.

Natively hosted videos will also appear in these search results, too. This is why if you search breaking news, often you find natively hosted videos from news websites.

4. Diversify revenue streams

25 percent of publishers surveyed said that diversifying their revenue streams was their highest priority in 2020.

Diversifying revenue streams is becoming an increasingly popular strategy for publishers. Why? Think of growing your website like investing in the stock market. Investing in many different stocks (like an index fund) is far less risky and volatile compared to investing all your money into a single stock.

Some publishers are afraid of display ads affecting their affiliate revenue, or vice versa. In reality, most affiliate sites earn more money from adding display ads than the little they lose in affiliate income.

Serial affiliate website builder Ben Adler has found great success in diversifying his revenue streams. After a year, display ads didn’t affect his affiliate income. His traffic and affiliate income stayed the same, but he just made more total revenue with ads. The benefit of getting more into ads is if you have evergreen content on your site, you could have that information on your site for 5 years and it will never go out of date.

5. Grow the value of your ad inventory

Growing the value of your ad inventory refers to increasing the monetary value of the physical ad space available on your website to advertisers.

How do publishers accomplish this? There are many strategies people use:

A/B testing: Are 6 ads on a page better for UX, or is it 7? Let’s say 60% of people prefer layout A with 6 ads, but 40% preferred layout B with 7 ads. If you choose the option preferred by the majority, you’re now losing out on the 40% of the audience that preferred something different.

Ad-ops shops/third-party monetization: These players jam a lot of ads on the page to gain a higher total eCPM (total price paid for all the ads on a page). This may earn you more money in the short term, but in the long term, ad dilution happens. Additionally, more ads on the page may cause visitors to visit fewer pages, leading to lower ad revenues.

Furthermore, some ads can decrease in value and cause your entire site to make less money over time. Why? Advertisers don’t want to pay for ads that people are not engaging with.

The reason behind this is that all visitors to a site behave differently. At Ezoic, we’ve learned some of the visitor behavior and ad attributes that affect the impact of ads on user experience are:

Time of day they visit

Day of the week they visit

Traffic source

Device type

Scroll depth

Geographic location

Ad color

Size of the ads

Ad type

Location of the ads

Number of ads per page

So, how do publishers try to optimize their ad inventory around all these shifting variables of visitor behavior?

Multivariate testing is the best way to increase AdSense revenue in 2020

It would take publishers that have a large team of people months or even years to test all the visitor behavior and ad attributes I mentioned above. If you monetize with programmatic ads, the two main competing goals are UX and ad revenue.

The only way to shrink the gap between these two competing goals over time is by continual multivariate testing on a per-user, per visit basis. Ezoic’s software uses real machine learning to grow revenues and improve user experience over time.

Do you have any questions on any of these tactics? Let me know in the comments.

Allen is a published author and accomplished digital marketer. The author of two separate novels, Allen is a developing marketer with a deep understanding of the online publishing landscape. Allen currently serves as Ezoic’s head of content and works directly with publishers and industry partners to bring emerging news and stories to Ezoic publishers.

5 Comments

I think niches that will make you write high quality and long contents, have a fairly techy audience who wouldn’t close your ads and a very good traffic. Tech niches are great but aren’t the best.

To make things clearer, any niche that would make your visitors read all of your contents or increase engagement is the bet niche.

Let’s say you visit a blog on how to make your marriage work and there are ads on it, some of those ads will be highly target and related to the content. As you read through the article(you will surely do) to the end, chances are, one or two users will click on an ad that interests them.

That’s a good example of a niche that will earn well.

Let’s see an example from a website that just hosts links or downloads from other sites, what most of the users actually do on the landing page is to click on the download link and voila, that’s all.

You see, niche and audience behaviours are different.

Finally, while it’s great to write contents that will attract worldwide readers, it’s more profitable to write high quality contents and get traffic from countries like the USA, UK, Canada and the likes of them.

These countries have users who engage with stuffs online more than other developing nations and advertisers are ready to pay well for clicks.

Combining all these and using a cool AI powered system for publishers like Ezoic, you’re gonna love what you do because the revenue will be high.